Martial Artists

[Deathblane]

Heh my sensi is a 'charecter' to say the least, but he's been training in karate for 40 years now and is an 8th dan.

The thing about sparring, is that what direction do you take it? A lot of clubs do competition sparring, which trains you to be an excellent competition fighter.
However in a competiton you can't use elbows, open hand techniques, headbuts and a polethora of other moves. You then learn how to get very close but not to contact. You also learn all sorts of 'flicky' moves that earn you a point in competition but wouldn't seriously hurt your opponent.
To learn to fight for real you either need to fight with full contact or spar in such a way that if your opponent wasn't skillfull enough to block/get out the way you'd hit them hard and accurately.
This is what you do in my dojo. We start of with no freestyle sparring (for at least the first two years) and gradually build up to it so that by the time I'm told to do what I want and just try and hit my contemporary he/she is prefectly able to block (seriously, I try really hard to hit people my grade or higher and we don't use pads).

Full contact sports like boxing really are much better for learning to fight than the martial arts taught at most dojo's, but if you can find a good dojo then you really are learning something lethally effective.

For reference, we had a black belt come over from Japan for a few months. He was awesome in competition but could not do the advanced free flowing black belt stuff that my sensie teaches.

[BigSteve]

I found this on youtube whike I was messing around, it reminded me of this thread. :)
This guy is awesome, hes the Netherlands greatest export after heineken, cloggs and Machio.

I thought he was just some dummy but hes an ex mma and ufc world champ. eek.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyBL_x86mQ8

[Dragon45]

Bas Ruten is just a downright cool guy. Supposed to be a good skateboarder too :)

I want to try his special neck crank in next tourney i compete in...